Thanks to the cooperative weather despite the gloomy predictions, we were able to put in a full day's work at the site today. A bit on the humid side -- but thanks to a couple of visitors to the project bearing gifts of popsicles in the afternoon, the crew worked up a storm. The only major downside was the discovery of our project crew by a horde of what might politely be described here as "some gosh-darn biting flies." Amazing that such tiny critters can actually "levitate" a human being two-three feet in the air with a single bite. Many of them perished in their assault on the crew today. I'll leave the less polite references to them to your imagination.

The crew searching for the northwest corner of the church foundation excavated about 18 cubic feet of soil today to get down to the foundation wall shown in the photo below. Although difficult to tell in the photo, the tops of the remaining foundation stones are about 2 feet below the ground surface in this part of the site. The corner of the church foundation is located in the next excavation unit to the west as the arrow indicates -- if the weather permits, we will expose that corner on Tuesday.

Crews working on other areas of the north foundation of the church continued work today. We now have almost 37 feet of the north foundation wall exposed or partially exposed (as shown in the photograph below) -- only one more excavation unit to expose the remaining 3 feet. The apparent "tombstones" directly adjacent to the excavations in the photograph are -- as noted earlier -- commemorative markers for Revolutionary War soldiers placed by local chapters of the Daughters of the American Revolution. They do not mark actual grave sites. We are however, leaving an unexcavated area around these markers as we proceed so that the bases of these stones remain intact.

A closer photograph of the newly exposed segment of foundation is shown below. While most of the larger foundation stones are not yet exposed, the trench for the foundation is already clearly visible -- the darker soil in the trench (filled with scattered limestone fragments) contrasts clearly with the lighter colored soil without limestone fragments. The yellow arrow points to the transition between the trench and the undisturbed soil.

A bit to the east, another crew completed work on their excavation area containing both portions of the north foundation and the brick "pathway" remnant. In the first excavation unit, this feature has been heavily disturbed -- only the small portion in the photograph below remained intact. They have now opened the next excavation unit to the east (left in the photo below). More of the brick "pathway" is already showing up just beneath the sod. Over the next few days, we will be focusing on following this feature in the excavations.

The three crews working on the interior and the southern wall of the church have a much more difficult task in some ways -- and haven't yet received full recognition for their hard work. Similar to the northwest corner mentioned above (at about 2 feet below surface), the southern portions of the church are buried much deeper than most of the foundation stones on the front wall. The three crews working on the south have had to carefully work their way through over two feet of brick rubble over the past several days. They appear to be almost finished with the "demolition zone" -- and hopefully we'll finally be able to feature some of their discoveries in the next day or two. As you may be able to see in the photograph below, the walls of these excavations units are packed with brick and limestone rubble from just below the sod to the bottom. The limestone block fragments in the bottom of these two units may be part of two interior foundation walls for the church -- one running north-south and the other east-west. The two metal objects shown in the photo are an intriguing set of artifacts that remain to be identified. The next day or two should (finally!) answer some of those questions.

As the crew members demonstrate in the photo below, each and every bucket of soil taken from the excavation is processed through 1/4-inch hardware mesh to recover all artifacts from the mundane to the intriguing.

As each day passes, the crew members quickly become more and more experienced and confident as archaeological field technicians -- although we are almost halfway through our project, the pace of discovery continues to increase.